IN MY SENIOR year of college my teacher Kenneth Koch, sick to death of the tenacious obsession that prevented me from writing about anything except the First World War, said he would fail me in his composition course unless I wrote about something I actually had experienced.

After some fretting I produced a story about a party on a friend’s front lawn in my last year of high school. Professor Koch liked it—at any rate, liked it better than another chronicle of tragic folly on the Somme—and he read it aloud to the class.

As he read, the students around me began to get restless. When he was done, Alan Senauke gave voice to the general feeling: “It’s so phony. It’s so— bourgeois . These high school kids doing their worthless crud together—”

Koch cut him short. “You’re just sore because everyone in the story seems rich and happy.”

I wasn’t surprised by the disapproval. This was 1969, and everyone knew that suburban living represented a dishonorable flight from the realities of life. What did surprise me was the teacher’s equable assumption of my happiness.

The fact was, I hadn’t thought of myself as being especially happy. People, after all, are far more likely to believe they’ve just missed a golden age than that they’re living through one. But after class, looking back on it across only five years, I realized that I had been a suburban adolescent at exactly the right time: the moment when you could still buy a serviceable car for forty dollars and a hamburger for fifteen cents, yet ask for—and get—a buck seventy-five an hour for doing yard work.

These grown-up fixtures—an automobile and a salary—were pleasant enough, but it took another ingredient to make my village an adolescent’s paradise. Like every other railroad suburb, mine had been designed to be pretty. It was very pretty indeed and, I think, pretty in a way particularly appropriate to a teen-aged sensibility. Although in the early 1960s I had yet to hear the term “theme park,” my town was a superbly realized one.

A local architect, a man named Bowman, had lived and practiced there, and he was omniscient about the architectural past. He built a great many of the houses I bicycled past when I was little, and they were immaculate in every anachronistic detail. Not only would Bowman get the Tudor half-timbering right; he’d drop the middle of a roof an inch or two lower than the ends to suggest the slow settling of the house over the centuries.

And the realities of suburban real estate intruded to precisely the right extent: the Elizabethan manor, with its rosy old brick twisted into intricate chimneys and its rounded door showing that Inigo Jones had begun to make his influence felt in London, stood on just three-quarters of an acre of land. A hundred yards